Bharat Rakshak

ShauryaT wrote:Let me come to the defense of Shri Nishchalananda Saraswati ji. First, Thanks for posting the video. To understand what the Shankaracharya is saying one has to really understand our purusharthas/objectives and then understand that our systems of VarnAshrama were to meet those objectives. Many of the critics misunderstand this basic premise of what VarnAshrama is trying to do and the inevitable comparisons with western systems and paradigms follow as result of this misdiagnosis. The comparisions and contrasts with European experiences of class and organized church and the experiences of another people's history quickly follow, leading to a complete mess and muddled thinking amongst even folks sympathetic to indic systems.

The statement that major technology developments have been disruptive in nature certainly affects the nature of VarnAshrama as practiced in a given time frame, however, it does not change the basic nature of the objectives. IOW: One is free to evolve the VarnAshrama or even junk it - as long as the focus of the system is on those objectives. My humble submission is an evolved VaranAshrama and correspondingly an evolved Dharma Shatra is the need of the hour. However, this is possible once we are done with the kool-aid our current society is on based on the individual, a rights-based framework and equality. Technology has changed, systems have, not man and his quest to define what is considered righteous. This sense of what is right involves not just the individual but man, a social being, has to expand this to the family, the community, the nation and the worlds. People like me call this system Sanatana Dharma.

So-called Orthodox like the Shankaracharya are the true preservers of this Dharma. We can evolve the means and methods but the objectives have to remain the same.

A_Gupta wrote:One hour.
"Europe, India, and the Limits of Secularism" - Jakob De Roover
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaK5prUZp4o

Greg Johnson, an influential theorist with a doctorate in philosophy from Catholic University of America, argues that “Christianity is one of the main causes of white decline” and a “necessary condition of white racial suicide.” Johnson edits a website that publishes footnoted essays on topics that range from H. P. Lovecraft to Martin Heidegger, where a common feature is its subject’s criticisms of Christian doctrine. “Like acid, Christianity burns through ties of kinship and blood,” writes Gregory Hood, one of the website’s most talented essayists. It is “the essential religious step in paving the way for decadent modernity and its toxic creeds.”

Against Christianity it makes two related charges. Beginning with the claim that Europe effectively created Christianity—not the other way around—it argues that Christian teachings have become socially and morally poisonous to the West. A major work of alt-right history opens with a widely echoed claim: “The introduction of Christianity has to count as the single greatest ideological catastrophe to ever strike Europe.”

All cultures are unique, but some are more unique than others. “We men of the Western culture are an exception,” Spengler claims. At the heart of his book is an interpretation of the culture he named “Faustian,” a term widely used in the intellectual circles of the alt-right. As with all cultures, a single idea permeates the arts and sciences of the West. Its distinctive mark is an intense striving for “infinity.” According to Spengler, our culture has uniquely sought to see all things in relation to the highest or most distant horizons, which, in turn, it seeks to surpass and extend. The vaults of medieval cathedrals, the discovery of perspective in painting, the exploration of the New World, the development of orchestral music, the invention of the telescope and calculus—in Spengler’s story, all express the Faustian drive toward transcendence.

He arrives at this conclusion by claiming the West begins not with ancient Greece or Rome, but with the high Middle Ages and the birth of scholasticism, Gothic architecture, and polyphony. Here we have the springtime of a “new man and a new world”—and a new religion. Its cultural achievements are not testimonies to faith in God. They are the monuments of Faustian man’s attempt—in speculation, stone, glass, and sound—to propel himself into infinity. Of this aspiration, Spengler maintains, “the Gospels know nothing.”

The basic problem with modernity is “desacralization,” the collapse of spiritual meaning in daily life. Work, family, and citizenship are no longer saturated with spiritual importance, but are understood in functionally secular terms. “Man, like never before, has lost every possibility of contact with metaphysical reality,” Evola complains, because materialism “kills every possibility, deflects every intent, paralyzes every attempt” at living a higher spiritual life. Evola does not, however, call for a return to his ancestral faith. He calls instead for a rediscovery of a more primordial source of spiritual meaning. He referred to these perennial truths as “Tradition,” and he traced the disorders of modernity to our loss of contact with it. He did not date the fatal break to the Enlightenment or to the Reformation. No, the world had been slouching into spiritual poverty ever since the eighth century b.c., when the world of Tradition began to disappear.

Benoist’s case against Christianity is that it forbids the expression of this “Faustian” vitality. It does so by placing the ultimate source of truth outside of humanity, in an otherworldly realm to which we must be subservient. In his Church Dogmatics, Karl Barth notoriously described Christian revelation as the “abolition” of natural religion. Benoist is a Barthian, if selectively. He accuses Christianity of crippling our most noble impulses. Christianity makes us strangers in our own skin, conning us into distrusting our strongest intuitions. We naturally respect beauty, health, and power, Benoist observes, but Christianity teaches us to revere the deformed, sick, and weak instead. “Paganism does not reproach Christianity for defending the weak,” he explains. “It reproaches [Christianity] for exalting them in their weakness and viewing it as a sign of their election and their title to glory.”Under Christianity, the West lives under a kind of double imprisonment. It exists under the power of a foreign religion and an alien deity. Christianity is not our religion. It thereby foments “nihilism.” The allegation is explosive. Benoist means that Christianity renders Western culture morally lethargic and culturally defenseless. Most perniciously, its universalism poisons our attachments to particular loyalties and ties.

And here we reach Benoist’s remarkable conclusion. The decadent West has never been more Christian. Christianity imparted to our culture an ethics that has mutated into what the alt-right calls “pathological altruism.” Its self-distrust, concern for victims, and fear of excluding outsiders—such values swindle Western peoples out of a preferential love for their own.

On the contrary, in almost all Indian languages religion is translated as dharma and this creates a big cognitive problem for us. Traditionally dharma used to have a very different understanding than what was promoted by the word religion. There is raja-dharma (Duty of a king), Pati-dharma (duty of a husband), patni-dharma (duty of a wife) where dharma is used in the sense of law/duty. And, religion invokes faith, which is never connoted by the word dharma.

In sum, the idea of religion as cultural universal is not only wrong but harmful for the cause of decolonising the Indians.

In the Roman religio, the ritual practices were largely independent of one's belief about god. This was explicitly stated by the Roman statesman Cotta. Religio was defined as anything and everything that is transmitted from the forefathers. Religio was tradition. And, it was kind of a settled argument that no theoretical justification is required to uphold ancestral customs. Therefore, even if one's intellectual journey necessitates a belief that is different from that of his ancestors, he was expected to adhere to rituals of his forefathers.

The pagan Romans charged the Jews, to an extent, and the Christians, to a much greater extent, to have no tradition (religio) of their own. Therefore, Jews and Christians were devoid of religio and deemed as “atheists”.

The Christians did not have the privilege of having the Roman or even the Jewish tradition. Christians argued differently to demonstrate their legitimacy as religio. Instead of “ancient tradition hence legitimate” approach, the Christians transformed the question of legitimacy: Since their doctrine was ancient, therefore it was true and legitimate. The second question to Christians by pagan Romans was that even if their doctrine had been ancient, why should a doctrinal belief necessitate them to reject a common pubic practice? To this question, the Christians linked their practice to their doctrinal belief.

Please check Balu's lecture recorded by Arohi foundation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwe23-UpnME

The lecture is in Kannada. If you have followed Balu's research enough, you can make sense of it. Here is the stuff Balu discussed:

1. varna sankara: Gita and usage of duSTA. How Monier William’s dictionary gave the meaning for feminine duSTA translation just to accomodate this gita verse.
2. Purusa Sukta: the place of heart before the 19th century vs brain today
3. Shudra’s on the top; Brahmans at the bottom: Brihdarnya Upanishad
4. the so-called caste system in Maha Bhrata
5. Do classes exist in a tribal society? Rigvedic tribes?
6. AIT/AMT debates: how could chariots traverse the Afghan terrain when Soviet and American tankers couldn’t ?
7. Knowledge
1. critical discussion’ alone doesn’t lead to knowledge
2. one’s psychological attitude is necessary: ‘psychology of science’ studies this. Gita mentioned it 3K years ago
3. A description of Ashram in Mahabharata : interdisciplinary research center. Compare what our Gurus and Swamis sell in Ashrams today.
4. the absurdity of ‘vedic sciences’, ‘vedic knowledge’, etc, since ‘veda’ = ‘knowledge’
5. ‘Tapah Sakti’ =‘knowledge is power’
6. the nonsense that ‘vedic’ knowledge is hidden from others: Rigveda is religious poetry; since when poetry is knowledge? Books are not knowledge, any more than reading a physics book gives you knowledge. However, Bible, Quran, and Torah are knowledge, since they are God’s word; that’s why they are scriptures. Vedas are NOT scriptures.
7. ’Tapah’ is NOT ‘penance’. ‘Penance’ is for sinners, which all human beings are according to Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.
8. 'Tapah' is research. Does 'Tapah' give some powers like 'black magic'? See the relationship between 'esoteric' knowledge, the Devil, and 'black magic'

Indian traditions were once taps that brought life-giving water to us, Indians, says S N Balagangadhara. They taught us to live, in peace and content and seek happiness. “Because of the event of colonialism, Indians lost trust and faith in their own traditions.” Colonialism turned these taps off. This “did not merely sever our links to the land, to our past and indeed to knowing who we were. It also made us ignorant of the very existence of these taps, had us believe that these were useless drainage cisterns built by people from so-long-ago. We seem to have forgotten today that water came through them once. All we see are useless pipes, which work no more; that is what our own traditions have become to us now”.

We often see in Karnataka that scholars (and not lay people) find it extremely difficult to accept that the Lingayata tradition is an adhyatmic (spiritual) tradition. They see it as an insult to accept that a Basava or Allamais a gyani. Where has this assumption that adhyatma (spiritualism) is indifferent to ‘social problems’, come from? Since when?

A_Gupta wrote:http://indiafacts.org/anthropocentricity-of-modernity-and-its-effects-on-ecology-lessons-from-the-mahabharata/
Anthropocentricity of Modernity and its Effects on Ecology: Lessons from the Mahabharata

If anthropocentricity with respect to ecological problems is the problem – envisioning the universe as a dharmic system, in which we are instigated to be unselfish, is the answer.

This narrative about yoga’s ancient roots has become a sacrament for Hindu nationalists, and it is echoed in the West. But it is mostly myth, an idealized origin story of the kind so many would-be nation-builders, from ancient Rome to the Zionists, have fostered about themselves. The oldest Hindu scriptures contain almost no mention of physical postures. Even the Yoga Sutras, the so-called bible of yoga, include only a few short verses suggesting comfortable postures for sitting. Many of the postures practiced in yoga today appear to have emerged in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Dozens of modern ashtanga yoga postures are similar or identical to those found in a gymnastic routine introduced to India by the British in the first decades of the 20th century and originally developed by a Danish fitness instructor named Niels Bukh, who later became notorious for his pro-Nazi sympathies. Bukh, needless to say, has been conveniently forgotten by both Indians and the yoga-loving celebrities of Hollywood.

In Christendom, God is personal, loves all men, and sent his son to die not for the salvation of a singular nation but all mankind. Analysis of Dostoevsky’s Demons and The Brothers Karamazov indicates that Dostoevsky’s concept of Russian God is a uniquely Russian entity that diverges from biblically orthodox conceptions of God and faith. Underpinned by Russian nationalism, anti-Westernism, and Russian imperial doctrine, Dostoevsky’s Russian God notion emphasizes tribalism over Christian theological orthodoxy and is a footnote in the long history of state manipulation of religion in Russia.

obornost’ is an abstract Russian religious concept that was first articulated by Slavophilic thinker Alexei Khomiakov. It is a living community of believers that exists within the church and binds all together in Russian Orthodox faith. Sobornost’s community is explicitly exclusionary of Catholics, Protestants, and other Western denominations perceived as corrupt. According to Russian philosophy scholar Elena Besschetnova, “Khomiakov played a huge role in the formation of the Russian national identity, in the formation of the ‘Russian spirit’ and ‘Russian thought,’ giving to it religious connotation and its own special direction.” Sobornost’ thus has a relationship with Official Nationality and Russian chauvinism through its linkages to Russia’s exclusionary religious identity.

While Demons provides no explicit definitions or qualifying characteristics of either the Russian or European God, the quality of their being separate is both significant and utterly unbiblical. The Russian Orthodox monks in The Brothers Karamazov provide some insight to Russian God, in that Russian God should not be simply associated with Eastern Orthodoxy or Byzantine Rite. The monks chastise Constantinople’s leadership, saying:

We stick to the old ways, who cares what innovations they come up with; should we copy them all? … We’ve had as many holy fathers as they have. They sit there under the Turks and have forgotten everything. Their Orthodoxy has long been clouded. (p. 333)

Francis Fukuyama’s central contention still rings true: There is no conceivable ideological rival to liberal democracy.

“The end of history will be a very sad time,” he wrote, “I have the most ambivalent feelings” about it. He lamented the passing of the heroic age of mankind: “The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by. . . the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.” History had ended in the prefabricated, conformist lanes of suburbia. “In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history.”

Fukuyama was echoing the critics of modernity who lamented the rise of the bourgeoisie for its lack of class and culture. A century and a half earlier, Alexis de Tocqueville warned that, “Variety is disappearing from the human race,” because of the rise of liberal democracy, “the men of each country, more and more completely discarding the ideas and feelings peculiar to one caste, profession, or family, are all the same getting closer to what is essential in man, and that is everywhere the same.”
In those conditions of bland sameness, “All those turbulent virtues which sometimes bring glory but more often trouble to society will rank lower,” in liberal society. For Tocqueville, there was a real danger in the loss of those “turbulent virtues”: “What frightens me most is the danger that, amid all the constant trivial preoccupations of private life, ambition may lose both its force and its greatness, that human passions may grow gentler and at the same time baser, with the result that the progress of the body social may become daily quieter and less aspiring.

Thirty years ago, Francis Fukuyama famously argued that the end of the Cold War was “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” When he proclaimed the “End of History” he was not predicting the future; he was proclaiming a verdict: History had shown that liberal democracy was the most successful form of government by virtually every conceivable measure. History had ended in the sense that we had reached an answer to one of the key questions of the purpose (or telos, to be philosophically specific) of human civilization

The solution may be for the liberal state to step back and allow greater room for the pre-political institutions of society—the family, religious institutions, and civil society—to flourish and meet the spiritual needs of human beings. Only institutions like these can defang the natural human impulse toward political and religious fanaticism.

The revival of religion in some way attests to a broad unhappiness with the impersonality and spiritual vacuity of liberal consumerist societies.” Fukuyama’s appreciation for religion is part of why he is able to recognize the danger of post-historical ennui and yearning